Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

The Pew Research Center analysis shows how hard AI is hitting web traffic.

Google's search results have undergone a seismic shift over the past year as AI fever has continued to escalate among the tech giants. Nowhere is this change more apparent than right at the top of Google's storied results page, which is now home to AI Overviews. Google contends these Gemini-based answers don't take traffic away from websites, but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center says otherwise. Its analysis shows that searches with AI summaries reduce clicks, and their prevalence is increasing.

Google began testing AI Overviews as the "search generative experience" in May 2023, and just a year later, they were an official part of the search engine results page (SERP). Many sites (including this one) have noticed changes to their traffic in the wake of this move, but Google has brushed off concerns about how this could affect the sites from which it collects all that data.

SEO experts have disagreed with Google's stance on how AI affects web traffic, and the newly released Pew study backs them up. The Pew Research Center analyzed data from 900 users of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel collected in March 2025. The analysis shows that among the test group, users were much less likely to click on search results when the page included an AI Overview.

Pew reports that searches without an AI answer resulted in a click rate of 15 percent. On SERPs with AI Overviews, the rate of clicks to other sites drops by almost half, to 8 percent. Google has also, on several occasions, claimed that people click on the links cited in AI Overviews, but Pew found that just 1 percent of AI Overviews produced a click on a source. These sources are most frequently Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which collectively account for 15 percent of all AI sources.

And perhaps more troubling, Google users are more likely to end their browsing session after seeing an AI Overview. That suggests that many people are seeing information generated by a robot, and their investigation stops there. Unfortunately for these people, all forms of generative AI are prone to "hallucinations" that cause them to provide incorrect information. So more people could be walking away from a search with the wrong information.

AI Overviews are integrated with Google's results, and they are appearing on more searches all the time.

Credit: Google

This problem is unlikely to improve over time. Since launching AI Overviews, Google has repeatedly expanded the number of searches that get robot summaries. The Pew Research Center says that about 1 in 5 searches now have AI Overviews. Generally, the more words in a search, the more likely it is to trigger an AI Overview, and that's especially true for searches phrased as questions. The research shows that 60 percent of questions and 36 percent of full-sentence searches are answered by the AI.

This research provides more evidence that Google's use of AI is changing the way people gather information and interact with search results. The trends are bad for web publishing, but Google's profits have never been higher. Funny how that works.

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Posted Wednesday 23 July 2025 at 12:56 pm AEST (my time).

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